Bleh, it doesn’t work. Unified skin generates non-manifold geometry, IE edges sharing more than 2 faces. Big No No. 
If we just had a “Quick Edit” mode for geometry, I could pull these warts out.
Okay, I think I have a workaround…
Run unified skin twice. The first time, it captures all the geometry that leads to ‘warts’. The next time, after smoothing the figure, that wart generating geometry is gone, so it should work.
Also, projecting the geometry through the rigging/topo menus is leading to spikey geometry errors sometime, or ugly holes in the mesh. If anyone has a any suggestions, I’m open.
I’m so close.
The problem you are experiencing is the normals are flipped on one of your models most likely your original Z model. I had the same issue, the only way I found to fix it was to export the Z model at its highest level as an OBJ and load it into Z2 rebuild the sub d levels resave as a Z tool and reopen in Z3, export the lowest sub d as an obj fix the uvs and reload. I tried flipping normals in Z3 and still did it, tried flipping in Maya still nothing the above mentioned workaround was the only way that I found to fix the issue. Let me know if it works or if you need more info.
Hmm, when I divide the model in Z2, after importing it as a obj, it divides fine. I hope Z 3.1 fixes this issue.
Nah, other problems now. It contorts the mesh too much when projecting detail onto it.
Getting the hang of the brush though. Though it has some issues too. If you brush beyond the edge of the mesh, it can suck other parts of the model onto what you are painting.
does anyone know the workflow of doing a re-topology for a specific part of a basemesh, like the just hands.
my mesh keeps crashing as soon as i do a preview. I’m following rimasson’s Birth tutorial and struggling a little.
Allforcalisto, I´ve heard more reports about troubles with retopologizing hands. I must say I´m not certain if we solved that problem already. I´ll be retopo-ing hands myself in a couple of days, so we’ll see what will happen…
I think the rumored backface masking that will be available in Z3.1 will solve some of my problems… I’ll let you guys know…
I’m retopoing a whole body in a t pose, everything is working great except for the hands, not so much in finding where to place topology but just getting it so I can see the correct areas in the viewport. Is there a way to mask just the hand so I can have better control over what I am doing?
Also I previously modelled a hand by itself, is it possible to graft it onto the arm of the whole body model?
Hi James,
if I’m not mistaken you can hide parts of your model during retopo in the same way as when you are sculping. Pressing CTRL+SHIFT and dragging. That should give you a better view.
It should be possible to graft the hand unto your model. Check out this thread and Rastaman’s tutorials!
Hey Guys, it says: “New Topology Controls” on the website! :eek:
Now to find out what’s new…
- You can now move multiple topo-points with Move and a large brush size.
Hi,
I have posted this already in the 3.1-‘congretulation’-thread. but because it’s our business here to talk about topo-features, I post this again.
I just went a little bit around in the topology-features.
Sorry, I cannot see any improvement, in opposite, I discovered some major deprovements.:evil:
Retopoing works so far, but is much, much slower than before, especially topo-painting (using shift-LMB-method) is less than half as fast as before.
Additional what worked flawless under ZB3 is now buggy , buggy, buggy.
The created adaptive skin-meshes contains some holes, when using my easy-retopo-method with projecting the fine-details you will no more see your low-poly-topology when you have set all up for the final step etc.
What the f… did the programmers do there ? 
Did anyone from pixologic take a look into our topo-lab within the last weeks ?
2 months of hard discovering-work and now we are nearly back to stone age.
Thanks . 
Maybe I am a little bit to tired in the moment and made some faults in my own techniques, but I am really in the mood to kick the .1-Patch right from from my system and go back to 3.0 !
Yes, I noticed the slowness too. I haven’t spotted any improvements yet. Still have to look into it more focused though.
Would be bad if what you say is really the case Rasta: topology is one of the major improvements in Zbrush3 as far as I’m concerned, and if it is getting weaker that would be bad.
to be continued…
So far I checked 3.1 now concerning the topology-features, it’s thankfully not as bad as I first thought. 
But it is also far away from being any major improvement.
It seems Pixologic focused more on pushing up the UI-optic than any other thing.
And this new UI seems to be veeeeery resource-hungry.
The plain started App without any loaded meshes eats ~ 436 MB RAM :eek: , where ZB2 only needed ~ 148 MB.
That’s what I call ‘pump up the volume’.
Like I said above, it’s not as worse as first mentioned, but it has some drawbacks compared with 3.0.
First badly noticed thing is that the pushed-up UI seems to slow down ZB’ realtime-topo-functions like Shift-LMB-Topo-painting significantly.
It works, but much, much slower than under 3.0.
Second drawback I discovered so far is that some topo-setups don’t work as good as before. Some incomplete yellow meshes, a non-visible low-poly-retopoed-mesh in the Projection-fine-details setup etc.
Not so good for all who like to serious use the topo-features. :td:
Some things are better, so you have now a ZSphere-menue in the Preferences-Tab where you (theoretically) can adjust the topo-lines-colors and the micro-zsphere-radius, but it seems not to work at all.:rolleyes:
But the topo-meshes are a little better visible than in 3.0, but this cannot be called really an improvement.
So overall, concerning the topology-features I cannot find any serious improvements, in opposite,I noticed more slight drawbacks and a significant slower and RAM-hungry ‘schicki-micki’ UI that slows ZB down and eats my RAM that I could much better need for my sculpting and painting work than to see micro-pictures of alphas that look now alle the same from a normal distance to the screen.
Where 3.0 was a hammer compared to ZB2, this overkill-3.1-‘Patch’ is a work a the wrong topics.
The UI is nice but a question of taste.
But slowing my work down is not acceptable.:td: :td: :td:
It seems that Pixologic went here the ‘microsoft-like -way’ as from XP to vista.
Optical gimmiks (that no one really needs) counts more than workpower.
I hope the next release will focus more on some real improvements like polypainting in color-3d-layers and more developed topo-features etc. than trashing ZB again full with senseless RAM-eaters.
Understand me right, the UI is nice, but not for the price of a less power where you really need it. I run ZB for my work, not for looking on fancy popup-picis.
I have not upgraded at this moment
Rastaman: I don’t like what i hear and i trust that you are carefull in what you are saying.
One of the great things about Zbrush is that it was very light! i think the UI appearrance was enough, the only thing that i care was bug fixing, retopology tools developed, Multidisplacement, ZappLink. I hope there is way to disable some of the UI extras to work light!
Did you find the time to check about the low-poly-finger-toe-hole problem? this is always happening when you have only four sides on a zshere(like a cube)
I think i am going to wait for a new patch,
Retopology tool it’s one of the tools i really care to be reliable, if this is not the case i may choose the Maya way (like Petroc) that i don’t prefer,
Plakkie: check your messages
something is very wrong with your machine or your capacity to assess ram usage. ZBrush 3.1 uses 138mb ram on my WinXP Home without any loaded meshes.
There are three kinds of lies…
[list=a]
Just to demonstrate, try this.
Bring up zbrush. hit esc to get to the main screen.
Press ctrl-alt-delete, and hit ‘T’ to bring up the task manager. Find zbrush and look at the mem-usage column. Mine read something like 141,000 (about 141 Mb).
Now, minimize zbrush, and check the task manager readings. Mine now reads about 4500 (about 4.5 Mb).
Now restore zbrush and check the task manager readings. It will go up, but not back to the levels from before. Mine went back to 11,000 (about 11 Mb).
All programs behave this way under Windows. 
Hmmm, I will surely check the RAM-thing again. Sorry if I posted something wrong.:o
I checked the RAM-values via the task-manager, that’s right.
I started ZB 3.1 with a plain dokument and read the RAM-value in the Task-Manager, then while ZB 3.1 still ran I started ZB2 and did the same.
The values were as described above.
OK, I just did it again…Oh, you’re right, this time it shows ~225 MB.
So the task-manager fooled me, sorry again for that. My fault.:o
But especially for the topo-things I am glad that I have ZB 3.0 still as 64bit available and I will surely not upgrade that one so soon.
@ Yiannis:
I don’t have this finger-/toes- problem with my currently used mesh, I have so far only seen this with totally ZB-born models like the included demo-meshes.
What commonly occurs are holes in the finger or toe-areas when using the quick-retopo-technique.
But this can easily be corrected by hand.
I have currently another hard problem to solve in using my easy-retopo-with- fine-details-method, what is that holes (wanted like mouth, eye-holes and unwanted like faults in the mesh) in your original mesh lead to wired polys when the details are projected onto the retopoed low-poly-cage.
I can so far avoid this by playing with the projection-sliders, but the results lack then of details.
Because the model is not only fine-detailed, but also ready polypainted, there is also no way to fix f.i. mesh-faults in another app like C4D and reimport it; the high poly is to high to be handeled by C4D and a low-poly-export-fix-reimport-manouvre into the existing ZB-model is not possible because the number of points/polys changes.
And beacuse of the wanted holes (mouth/eye-holes) the retopo -> project fine details-method leads to the wired polys.
Arghhh.
But I will find a way, I hope.
So I add to by ZB-update-whishlist a simple feature for adding points and polys to meshes without the need of retopoing them totally.
In C4D I can fix a hole in the mesh within some seconds, but so far I see ZB has no function like this (beside a whole retopo-process).
hmm… 225mb still sounds like very much to me. what OS are you running, maybe that has something to do with it?
also, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for all your great tutorials, sweet work!
Thanks Whistler.
I run Win XP Pro.
I just checked it with various plain document sizes.
That causes the variations in the RAM-amount.
With my large standard dokument (1900 x 1400) it takes ~ 250 MB RAM.
With the smallest document it’s around ~200 MB.
But I have plenty of Plugins loaded (I use all the old ZB2-plugins with no stability problems).
That might cause the higher RAM-values on my system.